These words refer to the long-term duties that someone takes on as a livelihood or as his main interest in life. Profession suggests a position that cannot be attained without a considerable amount of higher education, and that involves one creatively in mental rather than manual labour. Once the word referred mainly to the three learned professions – law, medicine and theology – but it is now often used to confer status upon many other ways of earning a livelihood: the teaching profession ; the acting profession ; making his friends mostly among other members of the plumbing profession . Even when profession is used more strictly, it need not suggest dedication on the part of a given member. By contrast, one sense of vocation specifically stresses this dedication: finding early that he had a vocation for the ministry, though he ended up the legal profession instead. Moreover, vocation stresses a long-term commitment to something that is not necessarily equated with the earning of a livelihood: choosing painting as his vocation and earning his keep by working as a waiter. Less specifically, vocation can be merely a neutral reference to one’s form of employment; as such, it may or may not include the professions , but in any case it can sound euphemistic or ostentatious when so used: calling together a representative sampling of people from all walks of life and from every profession and vocation . Occupation is exclusively restricted to this last neutral possibility for vocation, though occupation completely escapes the danger of sounding over-elegant or euphemistic: drawn from occupations as diverse as medicine and carpentry.

Trade , work and job by contrast may suggest a range of occupations from skilled labour to the most menial of positions. Of the three, trade implies the dignity of learned skills in which inventiveness and manual labour are combined: programmes designed to teach early school-leavers a trade ; the building trades . Work is, of course, very general, and can apply to any sort of effort: the work of raising a child. In a professional context, it suggests the set hours of long-term employment: getting to work on time. Less specifically, it can point to a vocation or occupation in general: asking him what sort of work he did. Job is commonly used to refer to any sort of gainful employment, whether permanent or temporary: hunting for a summer job ; getting jobs for the unemployed. The word ranges in application from a single task or piece of work to a regular position of employment. It may suggest either skilled or unskilled labour, for its commonness gives it informal currency in any context: the job of turning out first-rate psychiatrists; an editorial job with a publishing house; to do a good job of mowing the lawn.

Field is an informal and specialization a formal word for referring to smaller groupings within occupations : a medical student who intended to study in the field of obstetrics; a general knowledge of law but with a specialization in divorce cases.